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Showing posts from April, 2007
Sidney sits at his desk staring at the flowery wallpaper behind it but really seeing the universe in all of its suffocating infinity stretch out before him. He can see what he believes to be the Milky Way (it isn’t) not too far off and then other clusters of stars and suns and cosmic debris all of which he cannot name. He blinks and focuses closer in, on the moon, and looks for the one area that he can correctly name. He has to wait about sixteen bars of Beethoven’s ninth symphony until the moon rotates enough so that he can point it out to himself and smile. “That’s the Sea of Tranquillity, Sidney my boy.” He notes the ragged edge of the crater that someone once told him was made by a crashing meteorite. Sidney thinks the sea has been well named and watching it float past always makes his brain slow down. But it’s difficult to stay focused on such a large and near object when all existence pans out in front of him, without boundary, edge or horizon. He lets the moon slip from his eye-